In the past decade, measures have been taken to warn the population about the dangers of smoking. While the smoking rate has decreased significantly since then, smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death throughout the world. Additionally, youth tobacco use has increased as the popularity of products such as e-cigarettes and hookah has risen. In America, 53.4% of college students have smoked at least one cigarette and 38.1% reported smoking in the past year.
Even though the hazards of smoking are generally accepted, there remains many smokers who struggle to quit. Those who try to quit are typically middle aged and beginning to feel the adverse effects of smoking. Yet, on average, smokers relapse four times before successfully quitting. Many smokers do not realize that it is normal to require multiple attempts to quit smoking and therefore need recurring intervention and support to aid them. Constant support from an individual's community is shown to increase the likelihood of quitting.
There are a myriad of websites that provide services to smokers such as access to resources, online support and help lines. However, most of these sites do not provide a mobile device-based application for an increasingly mobile population. In recent years smoking cessation mobile applications have also been developed. Most of these applications simply allow the user to enter in the amount of cigarettes that they usually would smoke in a day and then “self-report” any cigarettes that they did smoke and then calculate the money that they would have saved if they hadn't smoked. This self-reporting process is usually unreliable because users cannot always be trusted to keep up with inputting data.